and neither sheds a tear
by redwing55
Summary: axel and roxas. roxas and axel. 50 sentences, from the beginning to the end.


I RETURN, CHILDREN.

**Author's Notes**: Yeah. I couldn't really help it. This pairing (my personal OTP) has eaten my brain and won't shut up about their perfect angsty tormented love and how it doesn't get enough credit.

Plus, they were angered by the fact that Roxas is sometimes portrayed as this sweet innocent creature (my inner Roxas laughs at this), or how Axel is portrayed as a hyperactive spaz (and yes, i am soooo guilty of this.)

So I was bored one day and decided to just do a little writing practice, and since one of my worst habits is rambling, I decided to take up the 1 sentence challenge- 50 sentences, all only **1 **sentence long.

**Disclaimer:** Roxas and Axel are copyright each other and Square, format and some theme ideas go to the 1 sentence community over at livejournal, who already had a couple of Akuroku lists.

**Rating:** T for some swearing and images cat-lovers may find disturbing.

Very rough, very raw, but I tried my best to keep them in character- and also, not in order.

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**1)**

It is stormy when Axel stumbles across their newest Nobody- skinny limbs, bedraggled hair dark and wet, young, afraid- but when the boy senses Axel walking over he looks up, and his eyes are biting, bitter, blue.

**2)**

"Axel, no…_put me down!_" Roxas grimaces, thrashing about as his best friend spins him mockingly around the room, pinning their hands and chests together, and he keeps struggling until they waltz straight into the wall, both a little breathless.

**3)**

"I wish…," Axel says once, almost ferociously, but he doesn't finish the sentence, and Roxas doesn't ask him to.

**4)**

"I wonder," Saix says idly to Roxas, "why you still insist on your "friendship" when we both know he would kill you if the Superior said the word….just like he killed _them_."

**5)**

"Stop worrying about me," Roxas says before he leaves for his mission, and Axel almost says it-- almost says he can't stop worrying-- he _can't_, and he's fucking _scared_ that he can't—but Roxas is looking thoughtfully back at him and Axel's throat goes dry.

**6)**

They're both a little too excited when their prank succeeds, and it's lovely, the innocent way the younger teen is hollering and laughing, but then Laxerene, soaked, covered with the tatters of their cheap water balloons, looks straight at Roxas and says to Axel, in a low, smug voice, "Enjoy it while you can."

**7)**

_What a strange place to die, _Axel thinks, looking up at Sora, his bright, familiar face, his horribly naive eyes, _and_ _what a strange person to die for_.

**8)**

One night they steal roughly half of Xigbar's liquor cache- they're celebrating something, but they're not sure what- and their drunken laughter keeps up half the castle.

**9)**

_All's fair in love and war_, Axel thinks out of nowhere as Roxas (the Roxas who doesn't remember him) swings dual Keyblades, and as he fights back he keeps hearing it, over and over, _love and war loveandwar loveandwarloveandwar__**loveandwar**__…._

**10)**

In one of Roxas' books there's a whole section about a "wedding" that doesn't make much sense to either of them; Roxas thinks he understands the concept, but Axel still can't figure out why people need rings and a cranky old priest to prove they're in love.

**11)**

"Today's the day I became a Nobody," Axel says out of the blue one morning, and Roxas, thoughtless, says, "It's like your birthday," and it kills him, how Axel shrugs and gives him a wide grin, full of bitter joy.

**12)**

_Maybe it's a blessing_, Axel muses as he watches Roxas playing with his pretty little friends in their pretty little town, _maybe he's happier here_- but his selfish, nonexistent heart won't stand for that, and when he sees that obnoxiously camouflaged boy clap Roxas on the back, Axel clenches his fists.

**13)**

The Superior is looking at him suspiciously, and Axel hears himself saying, "I'm not biased…if you need that boy killed, let me do it."

**14)**

Roxas sometimes wonders when it happened; when the smell of scorched fabric, wood, marble, even skin became not an annoyance but a comfort; when the smell of ash became more intoxicating than the sweet perfume of roses.

**15)**

He did not get a real goodbye, and somewhere Sora is breathing, laughing, bumbling incompetently through the worlds, falling all over himself to be _kind _and _pure_ and worst of all _innocent_ …..and now Axel will_ never _get a real goodbye.

**16)**

After Roxas comes back from his fight with Riku limping and sporting three broken ribs, Axel, though he understands Riku is also fighting for someone he loves, cannot help but sometimes finger the sharper edges of his chakrams and imagine revenge.

**17)**

Looking back, Axel believes he was in love from their first formal introduction, when he had cheerfully said, "Hey, Shorty, names Axel, got it memor—" and Roxas had punched him in the gut.

**18) **

One of their rare joint missions Axel buys Roxas a balloon from a street vendor in a cheerful, overly-sunny world, a balloon the same flawless blue as his eyes; later, almost frantically, he sets fire to it, and over the smell of scorched rubber and Roxas' mild disappointment, Axel wonders when he had become the kind of person who bought blue balloons.

**19)**

"It's dark out here," Roxas says to Axel, when he finds the boy sitting on their balcony, "….and sometimes it can be nice, you know- a little darkness."

**20)**

Sometimes it will hit him suddenly that he has killed them, _him_- Vexen and Zexion, the rest- his almost-friends, his near-companions, his Nobodies- but then Roxas will blink at him sleepily in the mornings and Axel will forget them again.

**21)**

Roxas is reserved not because he doesn't have anything to say; he just finds it endearing to hear Axel babble to fill up the silence between them, and enjoys the power he has to shut the redhead up with just one, quiet look.

**22)**

Roxas loves sunsets, Axel wears nothing but black, Roxas hardly sleeps, Axel sometimes sings, Roxas is the best fighter in the Organization, but Axel is the smartest; Roxas eats ice cream when he's upset or depressed or just hungry, and Axel is the one who remembers his favorite flavor.

**23)**

"You're getting soft, Red…" Marluxia says, in that teasing, winding sneer of his, "….tell me, is it his smile, or the sparkle in his eyes--or is he just that good in bed?"

**24)**

Axel throws Roxas against a wall, Roxas punches him in the nose, Axel kicks out, hard, and Roxas shoves a well-timed elbow in Axel's gut; both are laughing, a hysterical laughter, wild and free.

**25)**

Roxas quits quietly and with certainty: Axel burns down a wing of the castle, punches the wall, and sets fire to Saix's cloak before he decides that he is too spineless to quit Roxas.

**26)**

"Gotta jump, Shorty," Axel says with a little smile, holding the ice cream bar safely above his head as Roxas leaps furiously about, "You gotta work for it."

**27)**

On his first day in the Organization, Roxas overhears Vexen referring to Number VIII as _that damn clown_: later, when Vexen is dead (_murdered_), Roxas will think of this and smile.

**28)**

Weapons flash, bodies twist around each other, legs pump, they sweat, they gasp, every limb shaking with the effort; when the fight is over, they stare at each for a second too long before they hurriedly break away.

**29)**

Roxas only considers Axel's eyes once; he muses idly that they are emerald green, bright and cold as jewels, and then becomes horrified that he is turning into some kind of prepubescent _girl_, bad similes and all.

**30)**

Axel doesn't know why he doesn't kill Sora when he has the chance; maybe it's because it's the "just" thing to do, but he's suspecting it had more to do with the arrogant look Sora gave him, the one's that as familiar as a slap to the face.

**31)**

Sora smiles wide when he meets new friends, but Roxas used to smirk; Axel can't think of a better example of the galaxies between what are supposed to be two haves of a whole, can't think of a better example of why this just _isn't good enough_.

**32)**

"No one would miss me- no one_ could_ miss me; and don't you dare pretend you're sad, because we both know you'll forget about me in a few hours….in a few hours, I'll be nothing to you again."

**33)**

Stupid, Roxas calls Axel, stupid, idiot, loser, freak, jackass; Axel takes it all and retaliates with the worst insult of all—beautiful.

**34)**

"A WHOLE NEW WORLD," Axel wails, pirouetting gracefully around a horrorstruck Roxas "A DAZZLING PLACE I NEVER KNEW…BUT WHEN I'M WAY UP HERE, IT"S CRYSTAL CLEAR, THAT I'M IN A WHOLE NEW WORLD WITH ME AND YOUUUUUU!"

**35)**

"I'm so FLATTERED!" Axel snarls, and Roxas-- who had accepted his fate, whose whole world had thoroughly gone to shit, who had already given up on his school and his friends and _himself_—wonders why it is only now he feels afraid.

**36)**

Sora is with Kairi- and she's nice and all, but the little part of Roxas still aware considers the girl, so innocent, as sweet as a shot of sugar to the brain---and suddenly feels dirty all over.

**37)**

"Axel…I've got to leave, and I know you don't like it, but it's what I want and I think it's the right thing to do, and don't you _dare_ try to stop me…" Roxas trails off, breathing hard, but his mirror doesn't offer up any responses.

**38)**

As recommended, they leave behind their duties and go on "vacation"- some quiet seaside town, with an ocean view—but within a few days hands born and baptized in blood are itching to hold cold steel once again.

**39)**

At first Axel entertained the idea that maybe Roxas and Sora could share their body, but the idea of Roxas' long legs-skinny torso-pink mouth-sparse freckles- the idea of _him_ being traded and tossed around like spare parts is almost too much to bear.

**40)**

Roxas, so in love with loneliness, so hopeless in the tangled web of social niceties, says to Axel, "I can be alone with you," and Axel understands that this is the best compliment he'll ever get.

**41)**

The Romance That Never Was, Roxas sarcastically calls it in private, with The Boys That Never Were.

**42)**

"You're coming with me, conscious or not," Axel says in what he hopes is a neutral tone; but instead it heads in the opposite direction and comes out cold; angry and so, so cold.

**43)**

They both know what is dancing on the edges of their friendship—the pieces hover patiently in place—one nudge—they are shoved together, tenuous and raw—the puzzle becomes strikingly clear--one shining second….and then everything explodes again.

**44)**

Roxas is near when Axel dies; Roxas watches it happen through Sora's eyes, takes a deep breath, and then begins to scream like an animal in agony (ripping his heart out, yanking, _**the fire**_); Sora, for his part, wonders why he's getting a migraine right before the most important fight of his life.

**45)**

"We are unnatural beings," Namine says, in that clipped sweet voice of hers, "not born of flesh and love, but blood and destruction; we are decay, we are the leftovers, we are _not_."

**46)**

The end looms somewhere on the horizon, but Roxas is watching Axel sleep; his catlike features relaxed and passive, his hair a bright stain against the pillow, his thin hands half curled and tucked, childlike, against his chest, and Roxas doesn't touch him, Roxas doesn't breathe, Roxas doesn't move at all.

**47)**

Axel teases Roxas about petting a stray cat and is surprised when Roxas, furious, breaks its neck in one swift motion.

**48)**

'You're a bad influence on me, VIII," Roxas accuses Axel after the redhead has taken to following him like a gangly shadow, "and I'm not exactly virtuous myself."

**49)**

Axel remembers when he decided to die for Roxas

(a stupid ending for stupid selfless characters who he had always hated in storybooks)

…but in the end, it hadn't been a hard decision: Sora is Roxas, Roxas in trouble,

_so, yeah,_ _okay_.

**50) **

Axel is kissing Roxas, Roxas is grabbing his face between his hands, and it hurts, this is sharp and painful, but Roxas is gasping and what he is saying is, "One day, one day, one day…."

_One day we will._

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End file.
